The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention. However, it should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgment or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the application.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,701,459, the applicants disclosed a root-cause approach to problem diagnosis in data networks. However, the recent increased utilisation of virtual machines as part of data networks has resulted in the diagnostic approach recited therein no longer providing a proper assessment of potential root-cause problems.
To elaborate, it is to be remembered that virtual machines are inter-related with the physical computer systems on which they operate since they share a common pool of central processing unit (“CPU”), memory, disk space and storage resources. Accordingly, a malfunctioning application running on one virtual machine may result in other virtual machines hosted on the same physical computer system being starved of resources which should otherwise be available to them. Similarly, abnormal processes on the physical computer system may result in poor performance of applications running on each virtual machine hosted thereon.
The root-cause diagnosis problem is further complicated because the virtual machines may themselves be dynamically moved between physical computer systems during operation. At the same time their identity (eg. IP address, hostname, etc.) remains the same and the applications executing on the re-located virtual machine continue to operate in the same manner, i.e. independent of the new physical machine(s) on which the virtual machine is running. This dramatically increases the difficulties in diagnosing potential root-cause problems as the relationship (or where the virtual machine is hosted across multiple machines—relationships) between physical computer systems and virtual machines need to be constantly updated.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved root-cause diagnosis process that takes into account at least some of the problems associated with analysing data networks that include virtual machines.